Thoughts on the Invasion of the US Capitol

 It’s all happening as I write, but here are a few reactions:

1. Fortunately we see Q-Anonics, Loud Boys and other right wing crazies invading the Capitol Building and not Black Lives Matter or the Left.  Think how many lives would have been lost if it had been the other way around.

2. It will be interesting to see how deeply investigators will delve into the lax security preparations for today’s senate meeting.

3. In the end, it all comes down to one question: where do the loyalties of the police and armed forces lie?  That is always the bottom line, but we can go for decades without confronting it directly.  When the left challenges state authority the issue is never in doubt, at least in the U.S.  When the challenge comes from the right we have to hold our breath.  There were video images a few moments ago of police gently escorting Trumpists out the door and down the stairs with no apparent thought to arresting them.  This indicates at least some softness toward the cause on their part.  On the other hand, I don’t expect there will be military or police resistance to the eventual securing of the building.  If the folks in uniforms were to go over to the other side, that would be the end of the political order.

This has happened in the past.  The end of Reconstruction was marked by white mobs that assaulted elected Black officials and were backed by “law enforcement”.  That was a counterrevolution that succeeded.  Around the world it has been a general rule: civil rebellions succeed if and only if the police and military are turned or at least neutralized.  It all comes down to that and always will.

4. Invading and shutting down the capitol makes sense if you think that a demonstrably fraudulent election has been imposed on the public.  If crooked election officials had doctored the results, those trying to stop the process would be heroes.  Actually, I wouldn’t want to live in a world in which people meekly assent to real evidence of stolen elections.  What makes today a travesty is that there isn’t a shred of evidence to support allegations of fraud; it is a product of cynical disinformation sponsored by people who believe honesty is an unnecessary constraint on attaining and exercising power.  Anyone who has propagated this disinformation is responsible in part for what has now happened: an insurrection is the predictable end product of widely-disseminated claims of electoral fraud.

The same goes, incidentally, for those purveying baseless claims that the coronavirus is a hoax imposed on us by Bill Gates, George Soros and their puppet Anthony Fauci.  If there really were a fake public health crisis seized on by governments to permanently regiment their citizenry, storming state capitols would be justified.  Disseminating disinformation along these lines is assuming responsibility for potential insurrectionary responses or violent attacks on public health and other officials.

The heroic defense of democracy and the fascist putsch take the same form, invading and occupying places of government and disrupting its operations.  The difference depends entirely on whether the motives derive from genuine evidence of wrongdoing or cynical, power-hungry bullshit.

Yes, More Questions

1. If the whole labour of the country was just sufficient for the support of the whole population; would there be any surplus labour or capital accumulation?
2. If the whole labour of the country could raise as much in one year as would maintain the population for two years, would the country cease working for a year, would the surplus be left to perish or would the possessors of the surplus produce use it to employ people on something not directly and immediately productive, for instance, the erection of machinery?
3. If surplus produce from the first year is invested in machinery or other productive capital in the second year would the annual output in the third year be the same as, less than, or more than that in the first year?  
4. If the whole labour of the country could raise as much in the third year as would maintain it for two years plus the addition output enabled by machinery would they cease working for a year, would the surplus be left to perish or would the possessors of the surplus produce use it to employ people on something not directly and immediately productive, for instance, in the erection of more machinery, etc.?

The End Of The Embargo Against Qatar

 Yesterday Saudi Arabia announced that it is ending the embargo/boycott of Qatar, and though reportedly the UAE leadership is not entirely happy with this, they are going along with this as are the other nations involved in this, Bahrain and Egypt. This had begun in June, 2017, reportedly with the encouragement and initial support by Trump and Jared Kushner, with them buying into it as part of an anti-Iran alliance, given that Qatar was accused of having dealings with Iran, with which it shares a major natural gas pool in the Persian Gulf. It took Trump and Kushner a few months to realize that the very important al-Ubeid air base used by the US was there, so they shifted to trying to end the boycott, which involved a set of 13 demands that Qatar was not remotely going to follow, including shutting down al-Jazeera. It looked for awhile that the quartet, or some of its members, might invade Qatar, but then Turkey sent a bunch of troops to Qatar and in various ways began supporting it.  Probably the greatest cost to Qatar of this whole mess was not being able to use the airspace of these nations.

In the immediate news reports Jared Kushner is being credited with having worked this deal out, which really is not so much a deal as simply a full cave by the Saudis, although apparently what the quartet gains is that Qatar had been bringing complaints to the WTO about all this, and these complaints are now withdrawn. I guess Kushner gets some credit for playing a role in undoing something ridiculous that he played a major role in getting put into place initially. He has also been the major player in getting the recognition deals cut between Israel and two of these, UAE and Bahrain, as well as Sudan and Morocco.

However, Juan Cole and other sources say that what really lies behind this move is the Saudis seeing the Biden administration coming in and recognizing that Biden does not at all approve of a lot of things they have been doing, including the assassination of WaPo journalist Jamal Khashoggi, some other human rights violations especially against female womens' rights activists, and the awful war in Yemen, which it must be recognized was supported to some degree by the Obama admin, but has gotten much worse since.  Supposedly the Saudis are scrambling and want to "clear some plates off the table" before the Biden admin gets in, and this also explains the Saudis quickly recognizing Biden's victory over Trump, even as some other foreign leaders held off doing so for some time.  They know they are in deep doo doo with Biden and those around him, and really do need US support.

An aspect of this is that is may be that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) has for at least a moment lost some power.  Supposedly it was his father, King Salman, who has been the main mover on making this deal.  In any case, it looks like a good thing, whatever it is really behind it.

Barkley Rosser

Zooming in on the Defects of PowerPoint

 I’ve just finished several days of staring, hour after hour, at the year’s economics meetings via Zoom.  What really struck me, beyond the content of the talks, was the way Zoom exacerbates “death by bullet point”.

PowerPoint’s capabilities encourage speakers to load up their slides with lots of text and graphics, which then leads the audience to glue their eyeballs to the slides and not the speaker.  This defeats the core purpose of public speaking in the post-Gutenberg era, which is to use the audience’s engagement with the speaker as a vehicle for communicating thoughts and feelings that the written word, even accompanied by pictures, can’t express.  The worst scenario, which all of us have experienced way too often, is when a speaker crams lots of text in tiny fonts into each slide and then reads it word for word.

As a teacher, I deliberately tried to upend this tendency without abandoning PowerPoint altogether.  I constructed very simple slides with as little text as possible, using very large fonts and relying on spatial organization, like lists and things pointing to other things with arrows to give listeners a sense of the ongoing structure of my presentation.  Sometimes I would insert charts or tables, but usually with only two or three headline quantities or relationships, easily seen in brief glimpse.  I wanted students’ attention to be focused on me, not my slides.

A few of the speakers I saw this week had the same strategy, but it was defeated by Zoom.  The standard Zoom screen gives you a tiny speaker window next to a massive space for slides; the main effect of PowerPoint minimalism was to produce a screenful of whitespace.  You could barely see the speaker even if you wanted to.

Why isn’t the ratio of screen space devoted to slides versus speaker image customizable?

More Questions?

1. What would be the ultimate effect on interest rates of a perpetually increasing accumulation of capital?
2. What would be the logical social response to a situation in which the interest rate on money is effectively zero?
3. What was the principal intention and object of the early political economists?
4. What effect does the detail of figures, the jargon of political economists, or the complexity of existing institutions have on the accumulation of capital?

Updating Bubble Bubble Toil and Trouble

 On Dec. 21 I posted on "Bubble Bubble Toil and Trouble."  Mostly things have not changed too much.  Oil is still running around $50 per barrel, stocks are not too different from where they were then.  I have no new data on real estate.  Gold is up a bit, now over $1900 again and scraping all time highs, but that is not too much higher than it was on 12.21/20.

What has been shooting up again, quite dramatically in the last few days, have been the cryptocurrencies again, especially bitcoin that has hit a substantially higher new high over $31,000 today. Others have followed, although not as dramatically, although second largest market Ethereum has passed $1,000 for the first time ever.  In any case, this is not a particularly informative post because I have no new information on why this is happening or what is driving this.  There are the same rumors that were around before about possible official digital currencies, and so on, although not any new news on those fronts.  Indeed, I remind that the outcome of any major rollout of official digital currencies might well crash the cryptos, with some people speculating they could also crash regular monies and even banks, although I am doubtful things would go that far.  But in any case, the crypto markets are going wild again, for whatever reason.

Oh, and happy new year, you all.

Barkley Rosser

The “it” Pronoun

The pronoun wars show no sign of abating.  How to replace the use of “him” and “his” to refer to people who are not male or whose gender is unknown?  For a while I used “him and her” or “his and hers”, but it is much too clunky, especially if repeated over the course of several sentences.  Then I switched to alternating genders, first using her/hers and then when the next opportunity arose him/his and so on.  But this is unsatisfactory as well, since it doesn’t distinguish clearly between instances where you know the gender (and can use the appropriate pronoun) and those where you don’t and are just throwing one out there.  Finally I gravitated to they/theirs, despite the deep belief, inculcated through decades of indoctrination, that it is a crime to mixed up singular and plural forms.

None of these is satisfactory, yet it is important to de-gender our language.  We shouldn’t default to a locution that places one gender ahead of another, and we should even go further and not impose a gender binary either.  All of that should be expunged.  Where to go from here?

I have a proposal, and this is “it”.  Very broadly, it/its has been used to designate things that are non- or insufficiently human instead of the him/her/his/hers complex, which is mostly reserved for our own species.  So-called higher animals whose sex is known, like your pet dog or cat, could be graced with him/his or her/hers, but if you don’t have this knowledge, or if the creature is considered lower, it merits only an it/its in common with inanimate objects.  A fish, for instance, is an it.  If you see a bird at some distance and are unable to sex it, it is an it.

Drawing the line in this way is objectionable.  I have been reading a bit of popular writing on animal cognition (Frans de Waal, Jennifer Ackerman), and it’s clear that referring to such organisms in a way that lumps them together with rocks compared to higher beings like us misrepresents them.

But what if we used it/its for everything and everyone?  A rock would be an it, yes, but also a bird and even a human.  Complete and universal itification.  In one swoop it would do away with illegitimate gendering and the Descartes-ish denigration of nonhuman beings.  The only drawback would be the erasure of a linguistic distinction between animate and inanimate referents, but the current use of it/its violates this anyway.  Yes, we would be uncomfortable referring to each other itishly, but any de-gendered linguistic change takes getting used to.

What do you think?  Are we ready for “it”?

And More Questions

1. Are there limits to the accumulation of capital?
2. Under what condition is there a limit to the accumulation of capital?
3. If there are limits to the accumulation of capital, what defines those limits?

Even More Questions

1. What is capital?
2. What power does capital have when invested in machinery, lands, agricultural improvements, etc.?
3. What happens to individuals when they have experienced the accumulative power of money?

A Few More Questions

1. What objections are there to the proposition that wealth consists of reserved surplus labour?
2. How may one answer objections to the proposition that wealth consists of reserved surplus labour?
3. What is the difference between value in use and value in exchange of goods?
4. Why should calculation of the wealth of a nation exclude (or include) its usual and necessary consumption?

A Few Questions

1. What constitutes the wealth of a nation?
2. What is the source of all wealth and revenue?
3. Does the method by which one receives income -- whether wage, rent, profit or interest -- indicate the ultimate source of the value represented by it? 
4. Do stores of money, machinery, manufactured goods or produce represent reserved surplus labour?

2021 Forecast...

...from 200 years ago:

"The increase of trade and commerce opened a boundless extent to luxury:—the splendour of luxurious enjoyment in a few excited a worthless, and debasing, and selfish emulation in all:—The attainment of wealth became the ultimate purpose of life:—the selfishness of nature was pampered up by trickery and art:—pride and ambition were made subservient to this vicious purpose:—their appetite was corrupted in their infancy, that it might leave its natural and wholesome nutriment, to feed on the garbage of Change Alley*:—instead of the quiet, the enjoyment, the happiness, and the moral energy of the people, they read in their horn-book of nothing but the wealth, the commerce, the manufactures, the revenue, and the pecuniary resources of the country; the extent of its navy and the muster-roll of its hireling army:—in honour of this beastly Belial** they made a sacrifice of the high energies of their nature:—they hailed his progress with hosannahs, though on his right hand sat Despotism, and on his left Misery:– they made a welcome sacrifice to him of their virtues and their liberties:—to satisfy his cravings they forewent their natural desires:—honour and truth were offered up on his altars:—and the consummation of their hopes was characterised by misery and ignorance; the dissolution of all social virtue and common sympathy among individuals; and by a disunited, feeble, despotic, and despised government!"

* "Change Alley": nickname for the location of the London Stock ExCHANGE (equivalent to "Wall Street")

** Belial: personification of wickedness and ungodliness alluded to in the Bible.

How is it?

Why then is it that no existing society, nor society that ever had existence, has arrived at this point of time, considering that in all times, and in all societies, excepting only the very barbarous, a few years would naturally have led to it?

How is it too, it might be added, that notwithstanding the unbounded extent of our capital, the progressive improvement and wonderful perfection of our machinery, our canals, roads, and of all other things that can either facilitate labour, or increase its produce; our labourer, instead of having his labours abridged, toils infinitely more, more hours, more laboriously, than the first Celtic savage that crossed over from the Cimmerian Chersonesus, and took possession of the desert island?

Wayback to the Socially Available Future

In 1995 I launched the TimeWork Web, which was a "research site" for investigating the history, theory, desirability, practicality, and feasibility of reducing the hours of work. The fruits of that endeavor included my history and critique of the "lump of labor" fallacy claim, rediscovery of Sydney Chapman's once canonical "Hours of Labour" analysis, and the rediscovery and transcription of Charles Wentworth Dilke's The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties deduced from principles of political economy. 

A couple of days ago I sent off my manuscript of an article about the 200-year old pamphlet, first read on microfilm in the basement of the UBC library nearly 22 years ago. The motto of this Sandwichman retrospective comes from Walter Benjamin: 

It is not the object of the story to convey a happening per se, which is the purpose of information, rather, it embeds it in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening. 

Here is the introduction and overview of the research project launched in 1995:

Who Has Been Warring Against Christmas?

 Where I am the Third Day of Christmas is just finishing with the news that Grinch Trump has ended his own brief War on Christmas and is signing the Covid-19 relief bill, thereby reinstating unemployment benefits for 14 million people although they'll miss a week of payments, as well as preventing millions more from being evicted from their rental housing units, along with the Omnibus spending bill so the government will not shut down after tomorrow.  There has been less noise this year about the War on Christmas by the usual gang of right wing media types who like to whine about merchants and others saying "Happy Holidays!" rather than "Merry Christmas!" during the runup to Christmas, probably because so many of them have been caught up in whining about Biden supposedly stealing the election from Trump.  But this somehow draws my attention to another group entirely who have been at warring on Christmas for a long time.

So according to most of the major Christian denominations such as the Roman Catholic Church, and the Episcopalians, and Lutherans, and others of that ilk, the official proper Christmas season actually is the Twelve Days of Christmas, the first of which was Christmas Day itself, with the twelfth day of Christmas being Jan. 6, the Epiphany, the day supposed the Magi (Wise Men) visited the Baby Jesus. But for many they are not even willing to wait until New Year's day, the official seventh day, to bring it to an end.  There I was on Facebook yesterday, the second day, also known as Boxing Day in UK and some other places, and an FB friend posted about being "glad it is over," with a commenter on that thread getting even more worked up and declaring to have "taken down out tree and put away all the decorations, I could hardly wait for it to end!"  Yikes! Along these lines for some years now around here there is a rock/pop radio station that begins playing cheesy commercial "Christmas" music like "Frosty the Snowman" all the time starting almost immediately after Halloween, but reverts immediately to its usual fare starting December 26, the Second Day of Christmas. Sheesh!

Yes, it looks like that old bugaboo, the commercialization of Christmas and those pushing it have been the real Warriors on Christmas, shutting down the Christmas season the minute after it truly officially starts. They have been at pushing it earlier and earlier into the year, so of course gobs of people are totally sick of it by the time Dec. 25 comes around and are ready to toss it all out the following day.  Hooray! Nor more Christmas!  For a long time there were no commercials before Thanksgiving, or at least so it seemed when I was young, although the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade had long been the unofficial beginning of the commercial Christmas season with it ending with the arrival of Santa Claus to be followed the following day by the Black Friday of Christmas shopping.  Indeed, that parade and Macy's and other stores in New York played a major role, along with the Coca Cola company in the early 20th century, in creating that modern image of Santa Claus, out of the image in the Clement Moore "Night Before Christmas" from the 1820s, which in turn drew on some versions of the Dutch Sint Niklaas who was celebrated by New York Dutch. All this was crucially at the heart of this vast commercialization that overcame the old Puritan resistance to any celebrating of Christmas.

But somewhere in the last several decades that Thanksgiving boundary was broken through.  The Christmas ads, and then the cheesy movies and music, all began earlier in November and proceeded to creep ever earlier, egged on by radio stations like the one near me that gets it going the minute Halloween has passed.  And in more recent years even the Halloween barrier seemed to begin to get broken, with ads appearing here and there even in late October.  No wonder so many have gotten so sick of it by the ostensible "First Day of Christmas" they are ready to toss their trees and purge their homes of any shred of decorations still lurking about.

Some have objected to all this.  One curiously has been the Jewish comedian, who came up with calling Dec. 23 "Festivus" to recognize this commercialized version of the holiday.  But not only has this not really caught on, but some have even accused him of engaging in "the War on Christmas" with his suggestion.  A quite religious colleague of mine who was a journalist once upon a time wrote a column that appeared in the Wall Street Journal of all places some decades ago in which he proposed that, like Seinfeld, we create an alternative celebration, which he said should be called "Excessmass," to be when the commercialized version of the holiday could be celebrated, so as to leave the good religious Christians like himself to have their proper holiday left alone.  That proposal has gotten even less far than the "Festivus" one by Seinfeld.

S o there we have it, folks.  The warriors on Christmas have been its commercializers, lot these many years.  Have a happy what is left of the Christmas season!

Barkley Rosser

Long Addenduem, next evening:

In may family when I was a kid, raised Presbyterian with a quite religious mother and a much less so father, we did not start celebrating Christmas until Dec. 1, the beginning of Advent, and did keep it up through Jan. 6.  Did not watch the Macy's parade on TV or otherwise recognize Black Friday or any of the rest of it prior to Dec. 1.

So I shall note how widely varying this is across countries.  In Russia Christmas is celebrated on Jan. 7 by adherents of the dominant religion, Russian Orthodoxy, although areas in the western part of the former USSR were dominated either by Catholics or Lutherans and thus celebrated it on Dec. 25.  As it was under Communist Party rule, public celebrations of Christmas itself were largely suppressed, although during most times were allowed to some degree to happen in the churches with services.

However, another much celebrated holiday had been celebrated since the time of Peter the Great that took on many aspects of Christmas we see in the West, trees, lights, and gift giving within families, as well as celebratory eating and drinking, with gifts being given by a Santa Claus-like figure known as Grandfather Frost (Ded Moroz) who is accompanied by his granddaughter, the Snow Maiden.  They are derived from pre-Christian pagan figures.  Anyway, this holiday is New Year's Eve (Snovem Godem), which is a much bigger deal than either Dec. 25 or Jan. 6.  It should be noted that Grandfather Frost is kept clearly distinct from Saint Nicholas, who is the patron saint of Russia.  In icons he is usually portrayed as beardless and with a long face, which fits his traditional appearance as thin and kind of grim actually, not a jolly old elf at all.

Then we have Catholic Mediterranean nations, with me having observed this period in particular in more than one year in Florence, Italy.  In this part of the world Christmas celebrations make a big deal about Mary and her role in it all.  So in Florence public Christmas decorations, especially lights, do not go up until Dec. 8, Mary's birthday. Most of those decorations come down after Jan. 6, but certain ones remain longer, most especially Nativity creches, which remain in churches until Feb. 2, yes Groundhog Day in the US.  But in the Roman Catholic Church this is Candlemas, coinciding with a pagan Celtid holiday, but known ad Candlemas and also marking 40 days after the birth of Jesus, when supposedly Mary entered the Temple to be purified, making it also the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin.  So there, for all those who want to get over Christmas on Dec. 26, take that!